Before seeing elephants in Elephant Valley at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, we came face to face with the destruction, only the remains are beautiful. A long, winding path takes visitors around and under the felled trees. Aged gray pieces of trees form arches, for example, over bridges that rise over clay-colored paths with hoof prints.
The design aims to reorient us, to take us along a path trodden not by humans but traversed and carved by elephants, a creature still misunderstood, vilified and persecuted for its cataclysmic ability to reshape the earth and, sometimes, communities.
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“It all starts,” says Kristi Burtis, vice president of wildlife care at the Safari Park, “by telling the story that elephants are ecosystem engineers.”
Elephant Valley will open March 5 as the newest experience at Escondido Park, aiming to bring visitors closer than ever to the zoo's eight elephants, who range in age from 7 to 36, while focusing more on conservation. The centerpiece of the more than 13-acre park is a curved bridge overlooking a savannah, allowing elephants to walk beneath visitors. But there are also nooks like a cave that, although not previously shown at a recent media event, will allow visitors to see the elephants at their level.
Unlike the popular Safari Park tram tour, for example, there are no visible fences or enclosures. Captive elephants remain a sometimes controversial topic, and the zoo's herd is a mix of rescues and births, but the goal was to create a space where humans are removed immediately and do not impede the animals' relative freedom by keeping visitors largely elevated. As an example of how close people can get to the herd, there was a moment of levity at the event when one of the elephants began throwing what was believed to be a mixture of dirt and feces onto the bridge.
An aerial view of Elephant Valley at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park, home to eight elephants.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“Our guests will be able to see the hairs on an elephant,” says Kristi Burtis, the Safari Park's vice president of wildlife care.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“Our guests will be able to see the hairs of an elephant,” says Burtis. “You can see their eyes. You can see the eyelashes. You can see how muscular their trunks are. It will really be a different experience.”
Featuring a multi-story lodge with open-air restaurants and bars, Elephant Valley features a natural design that's less influenced by the elephant's African home than in conversation with it. The goal is not to move, but to import community art (Kenyan wood and beads can be found along paths, rest spaces, and more) as a sign of admiration rather than imitation.
“We're not going to pretend we're taking people to Africa,” says Fri Forjindam, now a creative executive at Universal theme parks but previously a lead designer at Elephant Valley through her role as director of development at Mycotoo, a Pasadena-based experiential design firm.
“This is a slippery subject that can go wrong very quickly,” he adds. “How do we recognize where we are now, which is near San Diego? How do we populate this plane with plants that are indigenous to the region? The history of coexistence is important. We are not extracting from Africa, we are learning. We are not extracting from elephants, we are sharing information.”
But designing a space that is elephant-first but also built for humans presented multiple challenges, especially when collaborating teams aimed to build multiple narratives around the animals. Since meetings about Elephant Valley began around 2019, staff have worked to address issues related to migration and conservation. And there was also a desire to personalize the elephants.
“Where can we also highlight each of the elephants by name, so they're not just a huge herd of random gray creatures?” Forjindam says. “You see that in the shelter.”
Two of the eight elephants eat during a preview of Elephant Valley.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
That lodge, Mkutano House, a phrase that means “gathering” in Swahili, should provide opportunities for guests to stay, although zoo representatives say reservations are recommended for those who want to dine in the space (there will also be a takeout window). Menus have not yet been released, but the ground floor of the structure, which features a cabana-like roof designed to blend into the surroundings, offers close views of the pool where the elephants graze, as well as an interior space with a central tree under constellation-like lighting to mimic sunrises and sunsets.
Everywhere there are wooden carvings of animals and beads, the latter often hanging from sculptures made from tree branches. The roof, fitted with colorful fabric tapestries designed to move with the wind, aims to create less friction between the indoor and outdoor environments.
Of course, this space also has research and educational objectives. The Safari Park works, for example, with the Northern Rangelands Trust and the Loisaba Conservancy in Kenya, with an emphasis on studying human-elephant conflict and finding no-kill solutions. Nonprofit organizations and conservation groups estimate that there are about 415,000 elephants in Africa today, and the African savannah elephant is listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The water areas in Elephant Valley have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make navigation easier for the elephants. The hope is to inspire play.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Studies on the zoo's young elephants are shared with the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary in hopes of providing care for young elephants to avoid orphanage. Additionally, the Safari Park has conducted extensive screening for endotheliotropic herpes virus. “The data we collect from elephants here can't simply be obtained from elephants in the wild,” Burtis says.
One of the two entrances to the Elephant Valley is equipped with bee boxes; Bees are known to be a natural deterrent to elephants and can help prevent the animals from disturbing crops or communities. To encourage more natural behavior, the aircraft is equipped with timed feeders in an attempt to encourage movement across the surface and establish a level of real-life unpredictability in the search for resources. The water areas have been redesigned with ramps and steps to make navigation easier for the elephants.
The view from Elephant Valley's Mkutano House, a two-story dining destination in the new San Diego Zoo Safari Park space.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
With Elephant Valley, Forjindam says the goal was to allow visitors to “observe safely in luxury, whatever that may be, but not from a position of power, but rather as a co-inhabitant of the Earth, with as many natural elements as possible. It's not about imposing dominance. Ultimately, it needed to feel natural. It couldn't feel like a man-made structure, which is an outdated approach to any type of safari experience where the animals are the product, a prize. In this experience, this is home of the elephant”.
And the resulting feeling of Elephant Valley is that we, the paying customers, are simply their guests at home.
